“I seldom get this excited about a new collection of stories. Ethan Chatagnier has written a superb book, and I admired every one of these. They are inventive, gripping and surprising. He knows his characters inside out, and by the end of each story, you will too.” — Steve Yarbrough, author of The Unmade World

From the publisher: In ten provocative stories, Ethan Chatagnier presents us with characters in crisis, people grappling with their own and others’ darkness as they search for glimmers to carry them through difficult times, untenable tasks, uncertain futures. The collection explores with unflinching eloquence the quandaries of conscience posed by the present, but also plunges us into a startlingly prescient “what if?” world, exploring in both realms questions concerning the value of perseverance, art, hope, and heart.

Ethan Chatagnier has published stories in journals including Glimmer Train, Georgia Review, Cincinnati Review, and Five Points. His Pushcart Prize–winning story “Miracle Fruit” was published in New England Review 37.4.

Warnings From the Future can be purchased from your local independent bookseller or online.

“Bury It … is lit with imagery and purpose that surprises and jolts at every turn. Exuberant, wild, tightly knotted mesmerisms of discovery inhabit each poem in this seethe of hunger and sacred toll of toil.”—2017 James Laughlin Award citation from Judge Tyehimba Jess

From the publisher:sam sax’sBury It, winner of the 2017 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, begins with poems written in response to the spate of highly publicized young gay suicides in the summer of 2010. What follows are raw and expertly crafted meditations on death, rituals of passage, translation, desire, diaspora, and personhood. . . . In this phenomenal second collection of poems, Sam Sax invites the reader to join him in his interrogation of the bridges we cross, the bridges we burn, and bridges we must leap from.

sam sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator currently living in Brooklyn. He’s the author of Madness, winner of the National Poetry Series, and the two-time Bay Area Grand Slam Champion. His poem “Will” appeared in NER 36.3.

“Erika Meitner is the quintessential 21st century storyteller bearing witness from the vantage point of a social critic with heart, humor, and an incomparable voice.”—Carmen Giménez Smith

From the publisher:Erika Meitner’s fifth collection plumbs human resilience and grit in the face of disaster, loss, and uncertainty. Her narrative poems take readers into the heart of southern Appalachia—its highways and strip malls, its fragility and danger—as the speaker wrestles with racial tensions, religious identity, gun violence, raising children, and the anxieties of life in the 21st century.

Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010), which was a 2009 National Poetry Series winner, Copia (BOA Editions, 2014), and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018). Her poems have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Tin House, The New Republic, Virginia Quarterly Review, Oxford American, Best American Poetry, Ploughshares, and NER38.4.

Holy Moly Carry Me can be purchased online or at your local independent bookstore.

“Anyone who loves Vermont will want this on her bookshelf—a funny, smart, and novel look at the Green Mountains.” — Bill McKibben, author of Radio Free Vermont

From the publisher: The phrase “an animal a thousand miles miles long,” attributed to Aristotle, refers to a sprawling body that cannot be seen in its entirety from a single angle, a thing too vast and complicated to be knowable as a whole. For Leath Tonino, the animal a thousand miles long is the landscape of his native Vermont. Tonino posits that geography, natural history, human experience, and local traditions, seasons, and especially atypical outings–on skis, bicycles, sleds, and boogie boards–can open us to a place and, simultaneously, open a place to us.

Leath Toninio, a writer from Vermont, has also worked as a wildlife biologist in Arizona, a blueberry farmer in New Jersey, and a snow shoveler in Antarctica. His essays, reported stories, and interviews appear in magazines such as Outside, Men’s Journal, Orion, Tricycle, Utne Reader, The Sun, and NER 33.3

Autumn Again

It is autumn across the country. The aspen leaves in Colorado are yellowing and browning, the maple leaves in Vermont going red, purple, orange on their way to the forest floor. Days are pinched, nights long and longer. Here is a killing frost, a pane of puddle-ice. Here is the crock-pot, the chipped mug, the trusty sweater. The smell of smoke.The shadows. Here at last is the cold, the loneliness we have missed.

Summer is a pretty face, easy to love but without substance. So writes my dear friend Sean, and I agree. My body is tired with all the smiling,mymind heavy with that burden of relentless light. Goodbye, pretty face. So long, fare thee well. Here at last is a snug wool hat over headphones and a walk through the folded hills on a cloudy afternoon, deep into music.

For a decade, autumn has meant Arvo Part and his ten minutes of pure drift, “Spiegel im Spiegel.”I thank Sean for making the introduction. I’d just moved from Vermont to San Francisco, a city of blossoms and hummingbirds that feels like birth even in October, and I was not doing well with the change.A piece of me, a leaf inside, was withering, curling at the edges, drying out, as though trying to compensate for what could not be found in the local landscape.

When the song arrived, via e-mail, I was alonewith a bottle of wine and an intention to drink it down to empty. I did, lying in bed, headphones on, the piano and violin speaking calmly to one another of sorrow and beauty, how the two are always one. I heard colors in the music. I saw Sean in Vermont, in the mountains of our childhood, hiking beside a stream papered with foliage. I listened for hours, nodded off, dreamed those colors, woke for more. Took another gulp, then another.

Young men grow and move and move again, and always the seasons cycle. I’m in Colorado this year, rising with the dawn, walking with it,my ears searching for bugling elk. Thousands of miles away in Vermont, Sean is tuned for geese, maybe the silence of moss. Come evening we are both inside our headphones, sitting by the fireplace, entrancing ourselves to the crumbling architecture of embers. Soon my friend will send a note that says we’ve made it through another pretty face, the time has come, have a listen, enjoy.

What we humans do is associate, constantly associate, and wonder over our associations. We wonder how autumn can mean an Estonian composer named Arvo, how Arvo can mean a friend named Sean, how Sean can mean a long-ago bottle of wine, a tree just barely holding the last of its leaves, a tree there in the distance letting go. We wonder how a season can be a song and a song can be sorrow tightening our chest, welling up as tears. We wonder how that tightening, that welling, can be the beauty we’ve waited all summer to feel.

I stop on the trail. In German, “Spiegel im Spiegel” means “mirror in the mirror.” Closing my eyes, I see an infinity of images, everything reflecting everything else. In the music’s inner darkness, vision reaches across the country, from Colorado to Vermont and beyond. I open my eyes. I glimpse dear old friends. Colors. It is autumn everywhere, the aspens yellowing and browning, the maples going red, purple, orange on their way to the forest floor.

♦♦♦

Leath Tonino’s short story, “Salisbury Cathedral,” appeared in NER 33.3. He is a freelance writer and a poetry editor at the Afghan Women’s Writing Project.

NER Digital is New England Review’s online project dedicated to original creative writing for the web. “Confluences” presents writers’ encounters with works of art such as books, plays, poems, films, paintings, sculptures, or buildings. To submit an essay to our series, please read our guidelines.

Confluences

After collaborating on the autobiographies of some of the world’s most famous subjects, Peter Knobler turns towards home and writes about memory, music, and his mother. “When I was growing up we had spent many Sunday mornings in our Greenwich Village home listening to Mahalia Jackson, Harry Belafonte, the Weavers—records that now sat on her shelves like tablets.”